This very elegant neartic wader was found on the bank of the Bride River beside Tallow Bridge in Co. Waterford on December 15th, 2022. It's the 16th record of the species in Ireland and is a much rarer vagrant than its smaller relative, the Lesser Yellowlegs. It's also closely related to our more familiar Greenshank and has a very similar call.
The bird was found during a period extremely cold weather and I eventually got a chance to catch up with it on December 20th in the company of two other birders, Sean Cronin and Tom Murphy. We were watching the bird feeding in a flooded depression on the river floodplain when it took off, and to out great surprise, flew towards us and landed in another pool only 20m away from us. It then relocated to another of it's favoured spots neared the town of Tallow, where it remained feeding, more or less oblivious of our presence, until we eventually departed. It's behaviour was consistent with many other neartic waders I have seen, showing little fear of human presence, in strong contrast to the extremely nervous or skitish behaviour of our European sandpipers and shanks.
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